[Novalug] PowerTop

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 16:24 -0400, Maxwell Spangler wrote:
> http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/
> 
> I'm just curious as to how many people are using this amazing utility?
> 
> For those who don't know it is an application similar to the classic
> unix 'top' command that shows what processes are using up CPU time.

I really like this utility, but beware, you can dig yourself a hole with
it.

Last night it suggested I disable the hal daemon's low-level polling of
the cdrom drive to save some cycles and enable some sort of SATA power
savings.  Sounds good, but today when I popped in a DVD to browse, Linux
had no idea that anything with the cdrom drive had changed.

There was nothing in root's history of the disable command I used, but a
quick google search gave me the method to enable it and now all is well.

So do your homework a bit and investigate what powertop suggests instead
of just blindly following it.  Some changes will last until you reboot,
but in this case, it made it standard until I changed it back.

Regards,

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
http://www.last.fm/user/maxwax99/